Hall's focus on expeditionary photography and her impressive juxtaposition and analysis of archival sources, including photographs, correspondence, photographic circulars, reports, newspapers, and magazines, make Framing a Lost City original and distinct...Framing a Lost City is a welcome and important contribution to the scholarship on photography, nation, and science in Latin America.
~Hispanic American Historical Review
The detailed archival work that forms the basis of [Framing a Lost City] is exhaustive and admirable, and this archival complexity is narrated with great clarity. This alone makes Framing a Lost City a substantial contribution to the literature.
~Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
[Framing a Lost City] is a welcome addition to recent scholarship that pokes at imperfect understandings that have become orthodoxy…[Cox Hall] casts a critical eye on the nature of scholarship, discovery and science as it was practiced by US academics a century ago. [Cox Hall's] meticulous investigation of archival sources allows her to recreate the conditions of a grand project's genesis, execution, and conclusions.
~Journal of Latin American Geography
[Framing a Lost City provides] valuable insights into some of the tensions between local, national and transnational actors that have shaped how [Machu Picchu] is portrayed and marketed today and the effects that this has had on the wider economic and cultural situation and self-definition of Cusco.
~Anthropology in Action
Engaging...Theoretically sophisticated, the book builds on the work of scholars such as Jorge Coronado and Deborah Poole that scrutinizes the way the Andes and its people have been imagined...Photographic images, the focus of Cox Hall’s well-researched work, played a significant role in shaping Machu Picchu as a lost city waiting to be found.
~Latin American Research Review
The value of Framing a Lost City lies in its examination of the creation of the brand that is Machu Picchu, and the persistence of that brand as a cultural icon... As Hall notes in the concluding chapter, Machu Picchu, through the lens of photography, remains the great lost city it never was.
~Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture
The archives of the Yale and National Geographic expeditions to Machu Picchu and Peru are a largely untapped treasure chest for the history of science, anthropology, and US–Latin American relations. Amy Cox Hall pulls open the lid, showing how the explorer Hiram Bingham used letters, cameras, and calipers to “develop” the Machu Picchu that tourists buy on postcards today.
~Christopher Heaney, Author of Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu
This is one of those rare books that should be read and appreciated by scholars, students, and a broadly curious public alike—all who are interested in the part played by science in fashioning Peru’s monumental heritage site, Machu Picchu. Amy Cox Hall’s rendering of this powerful narrative is in itself a marvel of first-rate storytelling.
~Florence E. Babb, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of The Tourism Encounter: Fashioning Latin American Nations and Histories